Last week our cocktail room played host to the 18th annual Homegrown Music Festival and everyone went to bed early and drank not very much at all.

Wait.

That’s not right.

What I meant to say is that everyone partied admirably hard and spent the daylight hours mainlining coffee and worrying what sort of pictures were going to surface on Instagram. For those of you not from these parts, Homegrown is eight days of music and art sprawling throughout countless venues in the Twin Ports. What started as a birthday party for Father Hennepin’s Scott Lunt has become an epic undertaking, staffed almost entirely by volunteers, featuring only local bands who do it for the love of the game and maybe some free drink tickets.

In the spirit of the day after (for the entire week of Homegrown virtually all of Duluth is having one big fat day after), I thought a selection of, shall we say “recovery beverages” might be in order. We’ve all tried our hand at Bloody Mary's (or Bloody Marins, if you’re doing the recovering at Vikre) but I’d like to propose a few new additions to the roster, featuring my ever so favorite spirit: Øvrevann Aquavit.

And while our best advice to you is to be a homegrownup and not drink so much as to become hungover in the first place…

We all know it happens, even to the best of us.

So without further ado...let’s start with some beverage backstory. Perhaps it's a regionalism. Most likely, it's a regionalism specifically centered around my childhood home where my mom used to make me Orange Julius when I was under the weather. To be even more specific, she made me Orange Julius and served them in a limited edition light up Lord of the Rings commemorative chalice that I think maybe came from a fast food restaurant?

(Don’t worry, if you really want to recreate the healing magic of the chalice, I’m sure you can hunt one down on EBay.)

And so, when I was brainstorming a feel better beverage this was the first thing that came to mind. You get the sunshine-y pick me up of vitamin C, B vitamins from the milk and electrolytes from the salt. Will it will be delicious without Aquavit? Sure. But if you are truly in need of a little hair of a tiny Scandinavian dog here’s my secret: it will be better WITH aquavit.

Øvrevann Orange Julius

Ingredients:

3 oz Øvrevann Aquavit

1 cup whole milk

½ 6 oz. can of frozen orange juice concentrate

1 ½ cups ice

¼ cup sugar

1 tsp. vanilla extract

Generous pinch Vanilla Salt**

Method:

Blend it, pour it. This makes about 3 cups which as you can see is enough to make a adequate beverage for yourself and a friend.

**If you take nothing else away from this post at least go make yourself some vanilla salt by scraping the seeds of one vanilla bean into ¾ cup of flaky sea salt then chucking the salt and the whole bean into an airtight jar and letting it hang out till you need it. You’ll need it sooner than you think.

Now, if you're not the type to mise en place an Orange Julius or have the forethought to make vanilla salt, I do have a second option for you: The Aquavit Pickleback. Though this combo was popularized with whiskey, Aquavit is a natural choice seeing as how dill is one of the traditional botanical components often used in the spirit. And then, let's take it even further up the recovery scale and use delicious lactofermented pickles and get all of that good bacteria working for our weekend. Again if you want to skip the Aquavit, some folks swear by just a shot of pickle juice the morning after. The choice is entirely yours…